UEA boss glad to take off her boxing gloves

Utah Education Association boss Pat Rusk, with her signature rhetoric about a starved public school system she says deserves more money, not an overhaul, has some Capitol Hill enemies.

But the leader of the 18,000-member union also has friends, handing over dollars and manpower to one of Utah's strongest political arsenals that has helped block Republican Party-backed tax credits or vouchers for private school tuition in one of the nation's reddest states.

But Rusk is tired of political pugilism.

Her two terms as UEA president are over.

She's returning to a fourth-grade classroom at Willow Canyon Elementary, tucked in Jordan School District suburbia. Her paper "countdown chain," from which she has torn a link each day for months, disappears today. The last link's message: "Now, hit the road, Jack!"

She looks forward to it.

"I've been too many places where people didn't like me. I want to go somewhere I'm liked . . . (and) have the UEA tattoo off my forehead," she said. It's as if "I've lived abroad . . . now I'm coming home."

Rusk started her career 25 years ago, teaching elementary grades mostly in Jordan District. The new grandmother loves to laugh, be around children and "collect people." She has a rocking chair in her house where neighborhood kids ask to sit with her, have a good cry and rock until they laugh.

Rusk, who sits on the KUED 7 Friends Board, the executive committee of the NAACP Salt Lake Branch and the Governor's Commission on Literacy, mentors colleagues and students — sometimes, for life. Former students send her Christmas cards and photos of their own children.

"She's a fabulous teacher, one of the best," said Sean Mabey, Granite Education Association associate director and Rusk's former intern. "It sounds cliche, but it's almost magical when she's in a classroom, what she's able to do."

She also is known to adopt strangers. UEA executive director Susan Kuziak tells of a time Rusk and her husband, Rich, were returning from a Wendover trip. They spotted a stranded young family on the roadside. The Rusks pulled over, loaded them up and brought them home, where they stayed for a week.

"If anyone needs help, her sense of what's the right thing to do is so keen," Kuziak said. " 'Oh, here, come live with us for a week, and we'll get you a doctor, and your dog, and come back out to get your car.' That's who Pat is.

"She's fun, you know?"

Yet many people don't know that Pat Rusk. They see the hard-line, "no excuses" Pat Rusk, the union figurehead. They see the fierce fighter in the perennial tuition tax credits battle, where the UEA goes head-to-head with Parents for Choice in Education.